destiny?”
Barking, too, has had a transforming effect on my career as a choreographer, performer, and teacher. I was influenced by a Dutch actress, one soloist among a class of performance artists who were studying with Marina Abramovic during a conference entitled “The Connected Body” at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam in the early 1990s. The actress presented her work in a stairwell alcove between two floors. I sat on the steps looking down into her shielded glass enclosure. Other people were using the stairwell to pass from one showing to another, and some stopped to watch her briefly. I stayed. She was nude and had the flawless body of a tall, thin thirty-year-old. When she moved it was on all fours: loping, pacing, stretching, attacking, protecting, watching us, or lying down and panting.
At times she stood on hind legs to paw at the walls in protest. She barked, growled, moaned. She was not acting. Her whole body was dog—flesh, bones, essence. I remember thinking that I had never seen “dog” before seeing her “dog.”
I have friends who own several Labradors. Early one morning during a visit to their home in Louisiana, my ritual cup of coffee in hand, we sat on a patio that opened onto acres of pecan orchard. First he, then she, then both, for more than an hour, threw sticks into the orchard for the three dogs to fetch. The sticks were then wrestled from their dripping jaws, only to be thrown into the orchard and fetched again. It was clear that the dogs would not be the first to stop playing. I remember thinking that this was the most wretched way to have my morning coffee.
I did not grow up with a dog, so it was almost thirty years into my professional life before I realized I had in fact trained myself to be a good dog in relation to my master/my body, my teacher.
My devotion to the practice of dance is similar to the Labs’ to the game. The Labs’ attention is on the master’s whole body, the energy being summoned: the force behind the throwing arm, the moment the stick leaves the hand, and the direction the stick is aimed. When I go into the studio, my attention is on my whole body in response to a set of conditions I set out to explore in the course of my work that day. I am poised, in a metaphorical sense, at the feet of my body, my teacher. My tongue could as well be hanging from the side of my mouth, dripping signals of readiness to be served by my body through dance.
April 2001: Zen saying: Being in the moment is not necessarily a great thing; however, it is all there is. My response to this is that there can be more to the moment than simply being in it.
Immensity at work is your openness to enlarging your experience of movement to include the space in which you are dancing. “What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive all of space moving as you move through it?” “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests” (Bachelard 1994, 184).
“What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive time passing?” These questions can both enlarge and deepen your experience of being in the moment.
How I practice performance stimulates my perceptual activity to such a degree that I no longer rely on my wonderful earthbound body and what it can do.
If I turn from movement as a primary component in making dances, replacing it with how I perceive space and time, will they suffice as the two primary components in my choreography?
August 2001: The question applied to the solo dance Music is: “What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive your movement as your music?” Or, what if you call your movement your music? Not music in a harmonic sense, but how your movement segments uninterrupted time. Would this not make your experience of time personal? Your choice to read your movement as music puts time in your hands.
The questions are meant to stimulate and compel you to keep returning to them while you are dancing.
Your perception of time is personal, while your perception of space is temporal.
“What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to perceive beauty and surrender beauty, both at once, each and every moment?” I cannot think my way into the question. I cannot force my eyes to see beauty and surrender beauty. This would occupy too much time. So I release the question from my mind, which I automatically house in my head, and spread the question down through my zillion-celled body. That body, my teacher, fosters instantaneously succinct, nonlinear, sensually insightful instances of how beauty might manifest if I do not hold onto what I think or want it to be.
MY MANIFESTO
No walking
No running
No lying on the floor
No hanging out in the body
No stretching
No floppy arms or hands
No deliberate loss of grounding
No noodling
No prolonged narrative movement
No obvious sequence of movement
No prolonged body memory apparent
No time to explore
No obvious frontality
No need to be creative or unique
No obvious adrenalin-driven movement
No apparent inner timing driving your dancing
No hesitation, no reconsideration
2 a lecture on the performance of beauty
MARCH 2003
In 2002 I was invited by Mary Brady to write an essay about the choreographic process for the inaugural edition of a journal, Choreographic Encounters, published in 2003 for the Institute for Choreography and Dance in Cork, Ireland. Instead I submitted the written score for the solo dance o beautiful. A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty is an edited, expanded, and performed version of the original written score.
Preset: Two large screens, adjacent and flush, are ten to fifteen feet in front of the audience. A page on a large pad sits on an easel to the right of the screens. Horizontal and vertical lines divide the drawing into four quadrants numbered counterclockwise, beginning with quadrant one at the lower right. A black marker is in the tray. Standing near the easel, I hold and speak extemporaneously into a corded microphone. In my other hand is a binder with the ten-page text for A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty.
The title for my solo dance o beautiful, choreographed in 2002, was an appropriation of the first two words of a patriotic American song. I was feeling tremendous resentment and anger toward then president George W. Bush and his administration that was coupled with a sense of personal powerlessness in regard to the crimes perpetrated throughout the world during his terms of office. I continue to feel this way in relation to American policy at home and abroad.
My challenge in choreographing o beautiful was: If I do not set out to choreograph a dance, will a daily performance of the same set of parameters, over the course of a year, ultimately give birth to a dance? This was my goal, because I did not think I could intentionally create a dance about politics.
Pointing to the line drawing on the pad and using its two
